But _en revanche_ New Haven was a beautiful little city, with a homogeneous population and a charming society, and better fitted in some respects for the seat of a university than it is to-day. It was already, thanks to the public spirit of Governor Hillhouse, the City of Elms; and it is hard to walk through Temple Street of a moonlight evening without a regretful recollection of Willis’s “Rosa Matilda description,” in “Edith Linsey,” of a place that must have been all Temple Streets,--a dream-city of shaded squares and white--piazzaed mansions shining among cool green gardens. In “The Cherokee’s Threat” he has recorded his first eager impressions of the new community that he was entering, as he stood and looked about him in the side aisle of the old chapel on the opening day of the term: “It was the only republic I have ever known,--that class of freshmen. It was a fair arena.… Of the feelings that stir the heart in our youth,--of the few, the _very_ few, that have no recoil and leave no repentance,--this leaping from the starting post of mind, this first spread of the encouraged wing in the free heaven of thought and knowledge, is recorded in my own slender experience as the most joyous and the most unmingled.” This was in the retrospect. He did not employ such fine language in 1823. His first letters from college are like those of any other freshman, simple in style, filled with affectionate messages to the folks at home, thanks for bundles, etc., received, requests to mother touching shirts and suspenders, and details of his daily routine. They describe the prayers at early candlelight and the meals in Commons Hall, with its twenty long tables, its big dumb-waiter, and its too abstemious tutor, who, from the vantage-ground of a raised platform, returns thanks when the dinner is only half done. “You may sit down afterwards _if you wish_, but it is not generally the case. There is an old woman who has been in the college kitchen twenty years, and in all this time done nothing but make pies. We have them Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the worst of it is we can only get one piece. I have fared rather better than the rest generally, for Durant seldom eats pie, and most always sends me his piece.” Then there was the round of study and recitation: Livy in the morning, mathematics at eleven, and Roman antiquities at four. “At recitation I have one of the descendants of the Dutch settlers in New York on each side of me. Their ancestors are mentioned by Knickerbocker in his history of New York.” These were doubtless Cortlandt Van Rensselaer of Albany, and Washington Van Zandt from Long Island. Between study hours there is foot-ball on the green in front of the colleges, “which game is not generally very edifying to the shins of the freshmen.” These last have subscribed twenty-five cents apiece “to support the lamps in the entry,”--a venerable trick of the sophomores, who “collected in this way